Brandon Graham and Simon Roy, Prophet, v. 4: Joining. I had never heard of this science fiction comic before, but it looks amazing. The art is strange and Moebius-like, the characters are intriguing, and the story (at least in this volume) spans millennia. Poking around on the web a bit, I see a number of very positive reviews as well.

John Joseph Adams (ed.), Operation Arcana. This is a collection of original fantasy stories with military themes. The title is strongly reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos / Operation Luna, a classic “magitech” series I always liked, and that’s basically what the first story here reminds me of too. However, looking ahead in the contents, contemporary magitech stories don’t seem to be the only focus (maybe not even the primary focus).

George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (eds.), Old Venus. I’m fond of planetary romances and early SF set on Venus in general (e.g. Burrough’s Carson Napier of Venus, Lovecraft’s “In the Walls of Eryx,” Leigh Brackett’s Venusian stories, etc.), and that’s exactly what this anthology of new/original stories intends to bring back. Based only on the preview, I wasn’t as sure of its earlier companion volume, Old Mars, but I’m sold on that now too (both begin with stories by Allen Steele set in the same universe, so seeing them together supplies a better picture of what’s going on).

Terry Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction. Pratchett didn’t write a lot of short fiction, but what he did write was delightful: no Discworld fan should miss this. I haven’t read much of his non-Discworld fiction, but what’s on preview at Amazon is essentially juvenilia of relatively mild interest.

Catherynne M. Valente, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland. Valente’s Fairyland novels are wonderfully imaginative, and now she appears to be changing them up a little. This fourth volume in the series introduces a new protagonist, and instead of being a human who goes to Fairyland, he’s a kid from Fairyland being raised in Chicago. I’d worry that it might be dull in comparison to the other books, but the preview is reassuringly strange.

Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical. A world dominated by a Dutch empire that exploits steampunk robots as labor? To me, that’s a pretty interesting start by itself, but the opening chapter of the book also tells a good story. I’ve enjoyed Tregillis’s earlier work, so I’m looking forward to this.

Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale. This is the sequel to Seraphina, which I greatly enjoyed. But what I didn’t know until recently was that both books are sequels to Hartman’s minicomic Amy Unbounded, which was thoughtful and charming and awesome, but also very, very low key. So when I read reviews of Shadow Scale suggesting its pacing is a bit slow in parts, I remain hopeful that just means it’s more like Amy Unbounded than Seraphina.

Mark Teppo (ed.), Thirteen: Stories of Transformation. I’d never heard of this anthology or even its publisher before, but at least five of the contributors are familiar to me and make me feel optimistic about it. The theme of “transformation” seems very broad, so I’m not sure what it’s all about. But the first story offers a hint that it’s going to be sort of literary in its aspirations but for sure pretty weird.

Joanne Merriam (ed.), How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens. This is a Kickstarter-funded collection of SF short stories about the immigrant experience. I recognize a ton of the contributors, and overall, the contents look great. In the preview, you only get to read a little of Ken Liu’s story, but it starts by explaining a short Lisp program to students from the very far future, which seems fun.